Katowice Culture Nature Festival / Love Conquers All / La Venexiana - NOSPR

This programme traces a journey through almost the entirety of Claudio Monteverdi’s musical career. It will transport us into the atmosphere of the final months the composer spent in his hometown of Cremona, which he bade farewell with the Second Book of Madrigals – a collection that surpasses even his later works in the intensity of its sonic imagery: the scent of flowers, air heated by summer, and the warm tears on lovers’ cheeks. We shall then move to the court of the House of Gonzaga in Mantua, where successive books were composed: the Third, which provoked a vehement reaction from the theorist Giovanni Artusi who accused the new composers of mistaking rule-breaking for invention thus producing disorder rather than true harmony; the Fourth, in which the Monteverdian madrigal finally transformed into the Baroque madrigal; and the Fifth, where nothing is left to chance. We shall pause in a Mantuan chapel to hear how the composer broke conventions and combined styles in the Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin), cohesive in defiance of all expectations. The journey will conclude in Venice, resonating with the mature madrigals from the four remaining books, including the Eighth, with its evocative subtitle Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (Madrigals of War and Love), as well as with less ambitious yet still beguiling arias, canzonettas, and scherzi. We will come to understand that Monteverdi’s music, regardless of where and when it was written, contains both the power of faith and amorous ecstasy, war and love, splendour and a trace of grime, and the blue of the Italian sky. Just as his life did.

Dorota Kozińska

Concert duration: approximately 70 minutes

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